It is pretty darn cold here at the moment, at least relatively speaking, and I had to go out and get birdseed because the feeders were empty and it’s so cold I don’t want the little birds to have to go too far for a meal. (The goldfinches, who have plenty of sock left, are out in force.)

And also Kevin was running late this morning, so I offered to run the trash to the curb. This doesn’t sound like much, but the curb is about a hundred feet down a gravel driveway, and when it’s freezing cold, dragging a full trashcan over potholed gravel is not terribly exciting.

However, I’m in a pretty good mood. My latest experiment seems to be working so far…I’m trying to find a way to skip my least favorite step of painting, the transfer of the sketch from digital to physical media. Normally I have to use an opaque projector and redraw the entire sketch, which is really annoying, and my sketch from this is inevitably very crude, so I spend twice as long cleaning it up. And that would just be part and parcel of life making art, except that so often the act of redrawing loses the life and energy that the original sketch had. (I don’t mind tedious work, but quality decline irks me.)

So, since Mr. Printy II can print on a lot of different media, I managed to feed it a fairly thin sheet of Strathmore Bristol, and printed the latest sketch very lightly on it, which I’ve then adhered to board with gel media. (I actually tried watercolor paper adhered to board many years ago, and found it a surprisingly cool surface to work on.) We’ll see if that provides a heavy enough surface for me to abuse…it’d be nice not to have to draw everything TWICE…

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